A Guided Tour To Exit – Bridging The Gap Between Startups And Corporations

During the last 20 years, I have co-founded (and sold) several companies, among them the online travel portal travelgate , the social news community YiGG, the app development agency AppAdvisors and the blockchain solutions provider Datarella. Most of these businesses have been positioned in the digital sphere which means that although they have been active in different markets they faced similar challenges regarding their transformational processes from 0 to 1.

If, as an entrepreneur, you have been working in different industries, you always start as a complete newbie in the next new industry. Your initial lack of expertise, network and experience in that respective market, makes you essentially start from 0. This is tough one the one hand, since you are used to work in a market with well-known processes and entities, but on the other hand, this fresh start provides you with a very steep learning curve that always is one of the sexiest aspects of an entrepreneur’s life.

Why Startups FailFrom a startup’s position, a steep learning curve is essential for bridging the gap between the creative, often naïve startup world and the dry, down-to-earth, hard reality of a corporation, the asset sale, the exit. The ostensibly most prominent reason for startup failures is illiquidity. You can apply this very reason for any kind of company. But, what are the underlying reasons for illiquidity? Simply put, it’s the startup’s inability to match the needs of either their potential customers or their potential corporate exit channels. They don’t offer what their targets need.

When, being in my twenties, I pitched my first startup to investors, I was struck by their seemingly strange, old-fashioned and outdated requirements. Then, I was absolutely convinced of my and my team’s superior creativity and our ability to supersede old legacy systems with our outstandingly innovative and paradigm-changing approach. Nowadays, often working closely together with market leading big corporations, I see a clear gap between the offerings and expectations on the startup side and the needs and expectations on the corporate side. And I can understand both sides pretty well.

Mentoring startups with SUPERDRIVEHaving engaged in mentoring in the startup scene for some years I have developed mixed feelings in regard to the typical approaches of matching startups with corporations, such as incubators, accelerators, etc. I don’t know of one that could boast about success stories. I order to come up with a better approach, together with my partners at Datarella and Prof. Oliver Szasz from Macromedia University, we launched SUPERDRIVE, a light version of our idea of bridging the gap between startups and corporations: on a universitary level, we worked ourselves through the process of actively supporting amd forming a (student) startup project in order to get acquired by a corporation. The SUPERDRIVE project was designed a s proof-of-concept: together with student startup teams we developed projects that would have been acquired by companies if it hadn’.t been carried out by students whose plans were to finish their studies.

CrowdStart CapitalIn early 2017, faced with huge opportunities arisen from the cryptocurrency boom, I decided to bring the PoC to the next level and launched CrowdStart Capital, a blockchain technology accelerator. CrowdStart Capital will invest in blockchain-related startups that are selected on the basis of their matching with and adaptability to the needs of corporations Datarella has been working with. CrowdStart Capital’s investment hypothesis is based on its ability to close the gap between blockchain startups and potential corporate targets with a short timeframe of about 12 months.

A Guided Tour To ExitThis guided tour to exit is what we see as the potentially most successful approach of startup incubation. If you are working in the venture capital industry or in a family office, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me – I’d be more than happy discussing the CrowdStart Capital approach with you.